Jerry Yang was at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum the other day, giving Mayor Ed Lee a tour of "Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy," a smashing show drawn from the Yahoo co-creator's prime collection of calligraphy, the ancient art of writing at the core of Chinese culture.

Yang, who a dozen years ago got hooked on the disciplined and poetic art he'd studied without enthusiasm as a kid in 1970s Taiwan - "It was like having to take piano lessons," he says with a smile - drew the mayor's attention to the bold calligraphic strokes of "Eight Poems on Yellow Ridge." It's a long horizontal scroll whose slashing and delicate script was from the masterly hand of Xiong Tingbi, who died at 29 in 1625.

"He was a Ming Dynasty general who got his head cut off by the emperor because he fell out of favor," Yang, 43, told the mayor, no stranger to political intrigue or to calligraphy. Like Yang and countless other educated children of Chinese ancestry, Lee practiced by writing his name again and again.

Making works accessible

The Internet entrepreneur, who's shaping his collection with the help of top scholars and curators here and in Asia (including the Asian Art Museum's Michael Knight and Joseph Chang), sometimes pulls out his brush and ink and copies the opening lines of "The Sutra on the Lotus of the Sublime Dharma," an exquisitely brushed 13th century hand scroll by Zhao Mengfu that Yang keeps a photocopy of. It uses 14,000 characters. The piece bears what Yang calls "these big honking seals" from the Qing Dynasty, which placed the work in its imperial collection 300 years after its creation.

"This is a masterpiece," said Yang, who's jazzed to see this and other works - many of which have never been shown publicly before - unscrolled and on public view. The artist, he went on, "is sort of the Thomas Aquinas of Chinese calligraphy. His calligraphy was used as the model for printing. Each line is beautiful. Even the very simple character for [the number] one is never quite the same."

Yang, whose passion for calligraphy is shared by his wife, Akiko, can read some of the poetry, commentary and eulogies brushed on paper and silk for millennia. Some of the characters, though, appear to him as abstractions, like the big, vital black forms in a towering 20-foot-tall hanging scroll by Zhang Ruitu (1570-1641) that Yang had never seen hung from the ceiling like this before.

"I'm never going to display it in my house like this," said the genial collector. He's worked with museum officials and exhibition designers to make these works, and the ancient tradition they spring from, accessible to a wide audience. You don't have to speak Chinese to appreciate them.

"Our goal was to make Chinese calligraphy less mysterious," said Yang, who speaks of the art's "visual, sensual and emotional appeal. We're trying to show different ways of approaching it. If you're an expert from China who's been looking at calligraphy for 40 years, you'd probably get something out of this and say it's good stuff. But if you're my 8-year-old daughter, you're probably going to say, 'Wow! Look at that wall. I have no idea what it says, but it's cool.' "

Not walking into a book

To draw people in and make the kind of East-West, ancient-contemporary connections that the museum is increasingly exploring, Knight, the senior curator of Chinese art, has integrated works by three Asian-influenced American abstract artists into the gallery where Zhang Ruitu's giant scroll hangs: Franz Kline, Brice Marden and Mark Tobey. Tobey had studied calligraphy in China, and both he and Marden acknowledged its influence on their work. Kline denied it. His well-known "I don't do calligraphy" quote appears next to the bold black-on-white forms of his 1959 painting "Leigh V Span," which Knight borrowed from SFMOMA along with the Tobey and Marden pieces.

"I think Kline protests too much," Knight said, laughing.

"We're trying to decode this art form that a lot of Westerners don't really understand. It was a challenge to present something that is about words, but not make it feel like you're walking into a book." The modern American abstractions "are a point of entry. People see a Kline near that big piece of calligraphy and hopefully they get it - that sense of line, that power, that movement."

Of course, it's even better if you know what the works are talking about. Knight points to "Completed on a River Sojourn" by Wang Duo (1592-1652), an imperial minister who expressed his anger over the "massive corruption in the court of the time," Knight said, and even mentions the affair between a court eunuch and one of the empresses. The artist was lucky not to lose his head or manhood.

"Things are a mess, and he's writing about it, and he's angry," Knight said. Members of the educated elite had to have good calligraphy, he adds. Weak handwriting was a sign of a weak personality. "Basically, these guys were writing calligraphy for each other."

In his foreward to the catalog for the show, which travels to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yang asks why a high-tech guy like him would take up such a low-tech medium. The simple answer, he writes, "is that for me understanding and appreciating Chinese calligraphy has been a journey of discovery, inspiration and fulfillment."

'Original social network'

Yang didn't set out to build a great collection. After Yang struck gold with Yahoo, a friend told him he had to have some paintings and calligraphy if we wanted to be cultured. He bought a couple of pieces at auction in New York, and, with Knight's help, connected with scholars and other collectors.

"As I got more involved and learned more, I became more addicted to the art," said Yang. He takes great pleasure in works like "Pieces on a Houseboat," which was collectively created around 1500 by 13 major artists who added to each other's work.